It is estimated that as many as 94 percent of incarcerated women were victims of physical or sexual abuse.
As my father’s health deteriorated, my brothers and I found him a little apartment, and I volunteered to move in and take care of him. Now it was my turn to cook good meals for Daddy. But I didn’t realize that also allowing him to continue drinking wasn’t taking care of him.
One day I was gone for an hour or so, and when I returned home, Melvin was there. He said, “Daddy’s dead.”
He explained that he’d stopped by to find me gone and Daddy passed out. An ambulance had come, but it was too late. The ambulance left, and my father’s body stayed, supine on the couch. All I could do was stare. I couldn’t allow myself to feel. All I could be was detached, hardened, numb.
As the rest of my family showed up, everyone gingerly stepped past Daddy and huddled in the kitchen, waiting for someone from the morgue to show up. Only Mama, having come from the era when people died at home, seemed fine with Herman Burton’s body there. She straightened up the living room around him, calling to us, “Come sit down, there’s plenty of room in here.” But no one moved, even though we were all squeezed shoulder to shoulder in the tiny kitchen.
I soon escaped to my bedroom and locked the door. Noticing I’d left the phone in there, I envisioned Daddy suffering in the living room and unable to call for help because he couldn’t find the phone. I felt sick. But I quickly pushed it all away, far, far away. Not even at his funeral could tears penetrate my veneer.
It had been some thirty years since my mother had put my father out, but all that time she’d steadfastly refused to get a divorce, always claiming she wasn’t ready to let go. Still, Mr. Fisher had never stopped waiting for her, continuing to provide for her. He’d also bonded with Toni in a way he never had with my brothers or me, taking her to church, cooking nice meals, letting her know how much he cared about her. After my father passed, none of us were surprised when Mr. Fisher asked my mother to marry him. But we all, including Mr. Fisher, were surprised by her response. Offended, she snipped that it was too soon after her husband’s death.
But Mama hadn’t bothered with Daddy in ages, so I doubted that was the real reason. Only later would I learn what was behind her refusal: when Mr. Fisher had bought her the house on Highland Avenue with the rentals around back, he’d inserted a clause in the contract prohibiting her from using the house as collateral to get any of her children out of jail. With this, he’d made it crystal clear: he wanted my mother, just not the rest of us. Deep down, Mama knew that wasn’t okay.
I moved back in with Chief. Maybe I took my hopelessness out on him, but it felt as if he was trying to control me. I wanted him to stay away from me, and I went so far as to drill a security bar across the bedroom door to barricade myself. Looking back, he was trying to control me, but so were the drugs. And that’s what drove me right back to prison.
It was 1996 and President Bill Clinton was in the oval office. While Nixon, Carter, Reagan, and Bush had hit line drives with tough-on-crime initiatives, it was Clinton who hit it out of the park. His policies put even more people behind bars, and kept them there longer. Two decades later, speaking at the NAACP’s national convention, Clinton would apologize for his anti-crime legislation. “I signed a bill that made the problem worse,” he said. “And I want to admit it.” The thing was, I couldn’t turn on the heat in winter or run water from the faucet on sorry. Sorry wouldn’t bring back those years.
This time, though, just as my white former bunkmate had described, when I was arrested for possession, I was booked under my Civil Commitment classification and N-number, not my previous criminal number. Automatically, I was sentenced back to California Rehabilitation Center and Addicts University—with the potential of being released in eight months.
Though recidivism rates were typically lower for those who completed CCEP class, it wasn’t uncommon for people to return, and return again—what my bunkie had complained was the “trick.” Even if it weren’t so much a trick, it certainly seemed a trap. Having technical violations, such as not passing a drug test, or even something as minor as not reporting an address change or not showing up on the right day to your parole officer, could land you right back there, though no new crime had been committed. I met women who were in their tenth year of CCEP.
Once again, I memorized the lessons in the textbook and watched the same slides and stilted movies. And, just as before, old wounds were prodded. But, this time, something unsettling happened: I couldn’t automatically shut myself down. When one of the movies described dysfunctional family roles, such as the perpetual caregiver or the scapegoat, something in me began to stir. At night, as I tried to fall asleep, scenes of my childhood flashed before my eyes. I thought I’d buried these memories too deep to unearth, but the images continued to grow more and more vivid. As the months went on, emotions that I didn’t want to feel flooded me. I was hurting like hell and had no idea what to do about it.
Ms. Tucker was my CCEP teacher and was known as the toughest on the yard. You couldn’t crack a giggle in her class or she’d dismiss you. She was infamous for having flunked her entire class—which meant that each prisoner had to wait months to get reclassified, and then wait months for a new session of CCEP class to begin, only to then repeat the entire six-month course. One day, as I was walking down the sergeant’s hall, I saw Ms. Tucker walking toward me. In her late forties, a short black woman with a round face, Ms. Tucker had a fierce command that made her nearly impossible to approach. My instinct was to get out of her way. But something compelled me, a yearning I couldn’t hold back. “Ms. Tucker,” I said, “could I speak to you for a minute?”
“You’re in my class?” she asked, sizing me up. “What’s your name?”
“Susan Burton.”
She tilted her head, which I took as an indication that I could continue. “I’m having a lot of stuff coming up, a lot of memories from my childhood, and about my son, and I’m really troubled by it and don’t know what to do with it all.” Before I realized the words were leaving my mouth, I told her about my aunt’s crazy boyfriend, and then about Mr. Burke. Never before had I breathed a word about what they’d done. And I didn’t stop there. I told her about the rape and my pregnancy. I told her about K.K.
Ms. Tucker looked at me for a long moment. I feared she was going to tell me I was out of line. She said, “I don’t want you to worry about passing my class. You have enough to think about.”
I will never forget that moment as I watched her continue on down the hall. For someone notoriously uncompromising to ease the pressure on me, that meant something. This was an official indication that things had gone very wrong in my life. Her validation caused me, for the first time, to cry my heart out.
Ms. Tucker and I didn’t have any individual interaction beyond that. I passed her class, went before the board, and was released after eight months. I had served six sentences over the past seventeen years and was returning to the same dead-end environment, still not knowing what to do with my feelings, with my life, with myself.
With $100 of gate money in my pocket, I stepped off that Greyhound bus around the corner from Skid Row. Again. No one was there to pick me up. Toni was now thirty years old and busy with her daughter and her job at the phone company. Her distance made it clear she wanted little to do with me. How could I blame her? It’s difficult to keep trying to love someone when they keep dragging you through the mud. She was disappointed by my wasteful existence. So was I.
Chief was in prison, on a drug conspiracy charge. No drugs in hand, he’d been arrested based on a telephone conversation. I tried to bring myself to write him, but I couldn’t. I was dealing with my own demons.
Mama let me stay in the efficiency behind her house. It was empty but for a daybed and a lamp. Searching for something to ground me, I visited a mosque. But that no longer fit.
From prison, Chief sent me divorce papers, and I signed them.
It started with Courvoisier, which seemed fancy and innocent. What was the harm in a nice glass or two of cognac to relax? It soon devolved, and before I knew it, I was caught up all over again, digging in my mother’s couch for loose change. It wasn’t even a decision, it just happened because there was nothing else that was going to happen.
Toni cut me off from spending time with Ellesse. She was right; I couldn’t be a responsible grandmother. Not when two-for-a-dollar cans of beer and crack were my most reliable companions.
I laid around on the daybed of that little efficiency, staring at the blank walls. Not only had my talent for divorcing myself from my emotions disappeared, but the drugs that used to turn me into a virtual statue no longer hardened me. Ms. Tucker’s response had awakened feelings too alive and too persistent. Scenes played in my head, incessantly, all pointing to the fact that, throughout my life, my family had little care for my well-being. One night, my oldest brother, Michael, was over, and I confronted him about how he’d treated me when we were kids. He pushed me out of the apartment and locked the door—just as he’d locked me out when I was a little girl.
I went in the front house and found my younger brother, Marvin. I was looking for his memories and seeking some clarity, but he took it wrong, yelling at me and acting like I was accusing him. Maybe I was. At that point, I didn’t know how to take any personal responsibility—it was everybody’s problem but mine.
The next night, my friend Joe and I were sitting in the little efficiency, drinking cheap beer. I knew Joe from years back, and he was also friends with Melvin, my brother closest in age to me, and the only one who’d been good to me. Back in the day, Joe, Melvin, and I ran together, and got high together. We were a wild bunch. All three of us had served time, but I was still doing the same thing, going nowhere, stuck in the same cycle.
“I can’t keep on like this, Joe,” I confided. “I’m forty-six years old, and my life is a big sum of nothing.”
Joe put down his beer and focused on me as if to gauge how serious I was. He always had sad-looking eyes, a sadness I suspected his military-style father had beaten into him. “If you really mean it,” Joe said, “I know of a good place you can go.” He wrote down the name of a treatment program.
The next morning I went into my mother’s house. She was cutting quilting patterns on the dining table. I’d watched her quilting ever since I could remember, and so did Toni, though we didn’t inherit her stitching talent. Mama made beautiful quilts and sold them to the people she was a maid for in Beverly Hills and Malibu. A Hollywood studio even bought some, and we’d glimpse her quilts in scenes of soap operas.
“Mama,” I said, “you remember Mr. Burke?”
She glanced up at me. “Of course I remember Mr. Burke.” She said his name with the brightness of thinking about an old friend.
“Mama, did you go out with Mr. Burke?”
“No, I never went out with Mr. Burke.”
“You weren’t seeing him?”
“He didn’t like me, Susan.” This time she didn’t look up. “He liked you.”
A tingling shot through me. I’d always suspected, but had never before wanted to be certain: my mother had known exactly what was going on.
I went out the back door to the little apartment. Later, I returned and again stood in front of my mother. Sitting on the living room couch, she was quilting her specialty, the Double Wedding Ring, a pattern of intertwining circles.
“Mama, about Mr. Burke,” I said. “I was just a little girl.”
Her face hardened. “Don’t try to run no guilt trip on me, Susan. You did what you did.”
“But, Mama, it was illegal. Why did you keep letting that happen?”
“Susan, you never learned.” She shook her head. “You just cross your legs, and you lock them. That’s what I always did.” She then paused from her quilting, as though exasperated. “Look, I could not help you as a little girl, and I cannot help you now. Why don’t you just go away?”
I went out back, the abused little girl now a mangled, broken woman. The pain was more than alcohol or drugs could smother. I called the place Joe told me about.
The man who answered the phone apologized and said they were full. He suggested I try a different facility downtown, so I got on a downtown bus. The rehab center was in Skid Row, but they said there was no curtain to create a private area for women, so I couldn’t sleep there. I knew if I was going to do this I needed to be away from everything familiar. Helpless, I returned home, though my mother’s place hardly felt like a home.
Later that day, my brother Melvin came by to visit Mama. Two years my junior, Melvin and I were always the closest. I loved Melvin, but the truth was everybody loved Melvin. He was pure charisma, the type of person who made everyone he encountered feel special. He had thirteen children from nearly as many women, and every so often he’d bring all the women and all the children together and, miraculously, it all worked out. No jealousies sparked, no tempers flared, and no one thought anything but the best of him. Everyone just wanted to be a part of his life. He was, after all, a professional connector. He connected people with lawyers and doctors and bail bondsmen and other specialties, and he billed both sides for the referral, taking only cash payments. He had a huge appetite for life. He drove Rolls-Royces and Lamborghinis, and, in an off year, he’d settle for a Mercedes. He always had the best of everything—art, clothes, women. The best of everything and a lot of everything, that was how Melvin rolled.
When I heard him pull up, I went out front.
“Sue,” he said. “I hear you’re trying to find some help.”
Joe must have told him, and it touched me that either of them cared enough to talk about it.
“Listen,” Melvin said, “if you find a place to go, I’ll pay for it. But I won’t do anything else for you. Don’t ask me for any money, Sue. Not a single red cent.”
I looked down at my feet. All I could do was silently nod. Melvin went inside my mother’s house, and I went around back to the efficiency and cried for an hour. I cried both from the compassion he had showed me and also because he knew my game—I had gone out front because I wanted him to give me money.
The next day, I again dialed the number Joe had given me for the treatment program. The man on the phone sounded relieved to hear from me. “Someone in the program left, and I heard in your voice how you needed to be here,” he said. “Come, we have a bed for you.”
I went inside to pack a suitcase, but my clothes were gone. My brother Marvin was there, and I asked what happened to my clothes. “They were in the way,” he said, apparently still sore at me. “So I threw them out.”
I called George, and he picked me up and drove me across town to Santa Monica, pep talking me along the way. “You’ve always been tough. You’ve always been a fighter,” he said. “As I understand from your brothers, you could hit pretty hard, even as a little girl. I know you, Sue, and there isn’t a whole lot you can’t do, once you make up your mind to do it.” George had been encouraging me for some thirty years. Maybe I was finally ready to listen.
I arrived to the treatment program, the CLARE Foundation, with nothing but the clothes on my back.